Yangon Informer

Nearly forgot all about that...time flies!

Dr. Khalilur Rahman, Foreign Minister of Bangladesh, has been elected President of the 81st UN General Assembly.

Until he took the foreign ministry, he was his government's High Representative for the "Rohingya Issue" — Dhaka's point man on the people displaced into the world's largest refugee settlement complex.

So it's worth noting how the Rohingya appear in the Vision Statement for his presidency:

They appear once. Not as survivors of a genocide, not as a people owed return or redress, but as a figure to be administered.

1.3 million displaced, sheltered in what he calls "one of the largest such concentrations in the world," to be managed through "responsibility sharing" and "predictable resources."

"Concentrations."

The language of a population to be contained and managed, not a people to be protected, much less shown solidarity.

What the document can't — or won't — say is the louder half of this position. No "genocide." No accountability. No perpetrator named — not the military-civilian diarchy that violently drove hundreds of thousands across the Naf and abandoned them there, not the Arakan Army that now governs the ground any "return" would involve. Only the diplomat's grammar of burden and financing: the grammar by which Bangladesh has for decades held the Rohingya as a file to be funded, and a population to be contained until they can be sent back.

That grammar is not about to be set down at the General Assembly's podium. It's going to be carried up to it with the presidential gavel.

The 81st President of the United Nations General Assembly has been elected:

H.E. Khalilur Rahman of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. 🇧🇩

Learn more about his vision for : bit.ly/49C2Zs7